Are you a hoarder or a neatnik?

You can tell a lot about a person in the way they organize stuff — or if they don’t organize it at all. Once I came into a new job as editor of a trade newspaper. Going around the offices to greet people, I stopped short at the door of the tech writer. It was filled literally to the ceiling with papers, software cartons, floppy disks, documentation, press kits, parts of computers and suspicious crushed packages redolent of fast food. The only open space was where he sat. Don’t worry, he said, he knew exactly where everything was.

That’s the hoarder model of information organization. The hoarder might be able to find things, but no one else can.

At the opposite end of the spectrum you find the neatniks. They mark, file, store everything according to strict routines. They like to keep their desks as bare as possible. Let’s call their approach the jukebox method. If you understand their system, you can find anything. Like a jukebox, you file Hanky Panky by the Shondells under D3, then anyone at any Seeburg Consolette in the agency can retrieve that song.

Hoarders and jukeboxers form the poles in differing views of how the federal government should store and manage its information. Information management is a critical function for agencies, and it’s the subject of a long line of laws, policies and regulations.

Not so long ago, agency resource managers worried most about retention and preservation under the assumption that public records must exist in perpetuity. Now the worry list includes fast retrieval, public availability of data sets, and use of data sources to improve decision-making and mission execution. And that most-favored word — customer experience. (Experienced customers used to mean shoppers who knew how to try on a dress right in the aisle during a Loehmann’s sale).

Hoarders champion Hadoop-based solutions that in-gather all data not otherwise put into a structured database. With the right tools, it can be retrieved, formatted and tagged later. Sometimes the term “data lake” is used to describe the mass of official but unlike and unstructured data.

Neatniks are the information and records professionals, using comprehensive and regulatory compliant systems to house carefully marked and classified records.

Like Felix and Oscar, the two approaches are converging. Several developments are driving the convergence. For example, in cybersecurity, network operators must correlate several data sources to pinpoint what happened in intrusions or data exfiltration. In improving customer experience, program people need all sorts of data about site visitors, how and where they navigate, what other government programs in which they might be involved. The administration policy of storing and managing all email electronically, in theory by the end of this year, means records managers need ways of subjecting massive and unstructured data — email — to governance and models for structured documents. Masses of citizens collecting data about air quality or the Earth’s magnetic fluctuations are coming into agencies under citizen science projects. Military video data, intelligence signals data — it’s nearly endless.

Neatnik data often must be kept in perpetuity. The secretary’s email. Rulemaking records. Messages and papers of the presidents. Financial information.

Hoarded information is often of more temporal value. It’s subject to schedules of destruction after its useful or statutory life. Network logs, email of worker bees, drafts.

Agencies need data of all types and sources available for applications they might not have yet thought of. The hoarders’ lakes and the neatniks’ silos of structured data must become one interoperable, application-agnostic virtual source. This year’s email mandate is only the beginning. Administration policy calls for electronic management of all records by 2019. I doubt a new administration would change that policy. What a good topic for the transition teams, soon to be underway, to start talking about.

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